Learning How to WaitBy PaBurkeSummary: A post-vignette of Learning How To Fly, from Jess’s POV. At least PG-13. Disclaimer: These characters so don’t belong to me. They don’t do what I want them to do, even when I’m writing them.Word Count: 1000+

*

Sam was home and Jess was thrilled, but part of her was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He had thrown himself right back into his studies, making up work that would have made any other person a quarter behind in the graduation schedule. He had proposed, with all the romance that any girl would have wanted, preparing his own candlelight dinner in their apartment. She had accepted and was joyfully planning the wedding. Like Dean had guessed, Sam only wanted one attendant, Dean and none other. Sam wasn’t going to budge on this.

Jess had showed Sam Dean’s message and still Sam refused to be moved. He had laughed and cried and cursed his brother’s visage but he had not changed his mind. Sam’s sudden stubbornness had dimmed Jess’s mother’s glowing opinion of her fiancé.

Sam still stood firm in amidst of Mom’s nagging. “I want two things in life: Jess and Dean. I probably won’t have a single other member of my family there, but I’m not getting married without my brother.”

“So Jess is supposed to wait for your brother to show up?” Mom had demanded.

“Jess understands.” Jess wondered if she understood as much as Sam thought or wanted her to.

“It’s not fair to Jess.”

“No, it not.” But Sam refused be moved.

“What about an officiate? Sam, these things have to planned way in advanced.”

“A friend of the family is a priest. He’ll fly out the minute he hears that Dean is in the states.” Sam had flashed his little boy grin. “He probably won’t let Dean pay for his plane ticket either.”

Mom hadn’t believed Sam, so Sam had called up his friend –that he had never spoken of or called before in all the time they had known each other, but he still had the phone number memorized. Pastor Jim had answered and had immediately and cheerfully agreed to officiate the wedding. Pastor Jim had even solved the problem of a church. He knew of a woman in California who owned a church building that didn’t have a congregation and wouldn’t mind them using it. Pastor Jim said that it just needed a couple days of cleaning.

Mom hadn’t believed the man. She had insisted on a name, a number and an address. Pastor Jim had spouted off the information. Jess, Sam and Mom had met Samantha Greve in the parking lot of a beautiful brick church. It did need a bit of cleaning, but not much. Nearly all of the furniture was covered with sheets. The bathrooms would need scrubbed and the floor vacuumed. While Mom and Jess had examined the church (both rather impressed and grudgingly so), Sam had talked to the woman.

She was short and overweight. She had looked Sam up and down. “So you’re John’s boy.”

“Yes’m.” Sam had been as polite as always.

“Will he be here?”

Sam had smiled, which surprised Jess and said, “I’d expect so.”

The woman had grinned. “Good, ‘cause those dimples of his could make my year. He’s a good man to have around.”

When Mom had questioned Sam about his father (and Jess had listened carefully) Sam said that he had lied. He had no reason to expect his father at his wedding and he hadn’t felt like upsetting the kind woman with personal dirty laundry. Sam had either lied to Ms. Greve, or he had lied to Jess and her mother. Either way, Sam was a much better liar than she had previously thought.

Sam didn’t care about anyone who couldn’t make the wedding if it wasn’t set in stone for a certain date. Sam wasn’t concerned that one of those people would needed something concrete was the partner in the law firm where Sam had done his internship and was going to be hired at.

All these little glimpses into Sam’s previously unknown character were nothing compared to how her fiancé reacted if Dean’s weekly e-mail was late by a couple hours. The base where Dean was stationed at was only able to send data to the states once a week and with it were normally e-mails for friends and family. The scheduled check-in was the same time every Monday. If Sam hadn’t received an e-mail by dinner time, he would start calling the Air Force. And if he hadn’t received an e-mail by Tuesday, he would skip classes to get his answers.

Sam.

Skip classes?

Sam hadn’t skipped classes when he had mono. And now he was skipping classes for a brother that he hadn’t talked to in all of the three years previous? A brother that he hadn’t mentioned but in passing?

Jess tried to remember how hard it had been for her the three weeks that Sam had been at Dean’s base and she hadn’t even known how dangerous it was. Sam had seen the danger that he hadn’t previously known his brother had been exposed to.

Dean wrote to Jess as well, but it was shallow, funny stuff. A lot of it was childhood stories. Rarely were their parents mentioned in the stories. Jess found enough evidence to support the idea that Dean had raised Sam, that he was a kind of surrogate father and heaven knew that Jess wouldn’t consider getting married if her dad couldn’t walk her down the aisle.

But what could have happened to prompt the three years of total silence? If Dr. Heightmyrer was good enough to mend that rift in less than three weeks, the woman must be the best shrink on the planet. If Sam and Dean had been this close before the rift, Jess could sort of comprehend why Sam had risked everything academically to get his only family relationship back on track.

Still she wondered what would happen when Sam and Dean were in the same hemisphere. She wondered if she would be forgotten.

Sam still didn’t talk about his childhood and his parents. Sometimes he expanded on the stories that Dean e-mailed her but most of the time he rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath. Sam and Dean had their childhood in common and they had the knowledge of Dean’s base that was so classified that Sam hadn’t even told her what continent or country it was in. They had so many things to talk about that Jess couldn’t connect with them.

She had tried to talk to Sam about it, but he had laughed off her concerns and had been genuinely confused as to why she would have any concerns at all. In Sam’s mind, Jess was going to be his wife and Dean was his brother. There was no competition.

Many of your stories do! But smart!Dean is something I prize and him being appreciated by everyone around him and challenged intelectually as well as physically was such a cherry on top.... though I keep wondering now if his Colt would work on a Wraith

Omg, I loved this! Such great introspection and characterization. I'm excited to read the sequel. There is a sequel, right? There is more than the related drabbles and shorter fics I have found, right? Is How to Make Friends the sequel? I only found the prompts. Sorry I seem so disjointed, I am currently medicated :-)